One of the common challenges in enterprise data centers is to correlate software products with real or virtual machines to count license consumption. Compliance regulations make it more and more a strong requirement to always keep track of licenses in use. In practical cases, more and more often complete, large file systems—i.e., shared resources—are mounted to a server for virtual machines and all software available there may be available on all related virtual machines as well. Hence, it is critical to know if a given software has been used and needs to be accounted for license consumption or not.
The problem may even get bigger if certain software products or software product enhancement packages may only be used in a trial period for a predefined time period but not afterwards.
Data center management teams are often confronted with the requirement to physically de-install a software product for a certain endpoint device, if the software product has not been read or used over a longer period of time, in order to reduce license costs.